Vita

1985

Start of M.A. studies on political science as major and sociology and education as minor at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.

1987

In the summer term, switch to the Free University of Berlin to study political science at the Otto Suhr Institute.

1988

Internship with the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in Washington, D.C. This resulted in the work The 1988 U.S. Elections. A Collection of State Data, published in 1990 as Working Paper 25 by the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies in Berlin.

1989

Start of work as a research assistant without a university degree in the research area "Education, Work and Social Development" of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education (MPIfB) in the project "Life courses and social change" with Dr. Johannes Huinink.

Tasks
Data processing of data from the life course study of the MPIfB, the ALLBUS and the socio-economic panel of the DIW with the help of FORTRAN and SPSS programs for time course analyzes of moving out of the parental home, family development and the educational and employment history of men and women.

Descriptive analyzes of life course data and the application of methods of event data analysis with the help of FORTRAN programs developed in-house for the calculation of parametric age distributions for events in life courses as well as representativeness analyzes of ALLBUS 1988 and the calculation of weighting factors.

1992

Diploma from the Free University of Berlin. A short version of the diploma thesis with the title Die SPD - Partei der Zukunft? Eine Kohortenanalyse der Bundestagswahlen 1969–1990 (The SPD - Party of the Future? A cohort analysis of the federal elections 1969–1990) appeared in 1994 in the anthology Wahlen und Wähler. Analysen aus Anlaß der Bundestagswahl 1990 (Elections and Voters. Analyzes on the occasion of the Federal Parliament election 1990), ed. by Hans-Dieter Klingemann and Max Kaase (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag).

1993

Start of work as a research assistant at the Chair of Domestic Policy under the direction of Prof. Dr. Jürgen W. Falter at the Institute for Political Science at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.

Seminars
From the summer term 1993 to the winter term 1999/2000 Introduction to Political Science, The Political System of the Federal Republic of Germany, Statistics and Methods of Empirical Social Research as well as introductions to the SPSS program package and working techniques on the PC.

Research
Analysis of social science theories of voter behavior using quantitative-statistical methods. The research focus was on voting behavior over the life course. This resulted in several lectures and publications.

Academic Self-Government
Establishment of the IT of the Chair of Domestic Policy, representative of the Institute for Political Science for the interests of the student CIP pool and IT representative of the Department of Social Sciences.

1999

Termination of work as a research assistant and change into IT.